Hi Claudio. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia. Your edits to GW Pharmaceutical caught my which led me to look at your Your edits to date and your userpage. I don't believe you are aware of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and so I am giving you notice of it, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

Hello, Daimyo2. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, please:

• avoid editing or creating articles related to you and your circle, your organization, its competitors, projects or products;
• instead propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• when discussing affected articles, disclose your COI (see WP:DISCLOSE);
• avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you.

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved with articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the first and most important step. We can talk about the second step, but let's talk about that after we discuss the first step. Before I get into this, I just want to say again what I said above - editors who want to work on content where they have a COI have a place here, if they mind the relevant policies and guidelines. And making mistakes is OK - the main thing is to simply acknowledge them, and not repeat them going forward. So...

For example here are some pretty clear issues with what you have done in the past, including today:

• you are involved with a group working on litigation about Rivaroxaban, and you added content to our article about side effects of that drug and you re-inserted it after it was deleted. You made no disclosure of your COI.
• you are involved with a group working on litigation about Ondansetron, and just today you added content to our article emphasizing side effects of that drug. You made no disclosure of your COI.
• today you added content about GW Pharmaceutical's drug candidate for epilepsy here, that I found promotional for the drug, and poorly sourced, and you cited your own article there too. I don't know if you have any relationship with GW; you have not disclosed any COI but I am not sure you are aware that you need to. And there is a concern you have a COI, because...
• you talk about your success as a freelancer and you have an elance profile offering medical writing. I don't know if you have ever accepted money for working in Wikipedia. If you have, you need to disclose that per the Terms of Use, as described above.
• You added content to your User page today, making an offer to hire you. This is absolutely not OK. Please see WP:UP#PROMO. Please remove that, and the other content promoting your freelancing work, right away. It is fine to say you are freelancer - and necessary for you to disclose work you have done in Wikipedia as a freelancer, but you cannot use your page to advertise your services. There is a line there that you cannot cross.

Would you please fully disclose articles you have edited with any sort of conflict of interest, or as a freelancer?

Again, I am assuming in good faith, that you have done these things without understanding the Terms of Use and the COI guideline, and I am hopeful that you will come into compliance gracefully, and this does not have to escalate.

After you respond (and you can just reply below), perhaps we can talk a bit about editing Wikipedia, to give you some more orientation to how this place works. You can reply here - I am watching this page. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 19:23, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Daimyo2 replied on my Talk page here. I cut it from there and pasted here, to keep the conversation threaded and in one place. Jytdog (talk) 19:49, 3 February 2016 (UTC) [reply]

Hello Jytdog, I'm not sure if that's the appropriate method to answer to someone else on Wikipedia actually. I browsed the pages about Wiki Talk but seriously... I can't understand how it works. I hope that's the right way.

Anyways. It's absolutely true that I am a medical writer, and that I am paid by people medical articles however:

1. I was never paid by GW Pharmaceuticals, at all. There's no conflict of interest going on here, you can check my curriculum, I never worked with this people (I don't even know them). I simply referenced my own article because I thought it was an interesting finding about a new potential cure for epilepsy, nothing else. My own article was fully referenced and pointed to all the studies that were recently published on the American Epilepsy Journal so it can be verified. Meds News on the other hand is a non-profit medical information website.

2.I did not know that publicizing my freelancing activities on my personal user page was prohibited. Wikipedia has so many rules it's impossible to know them all. Anyways, I promptly removed any information about that, but if there's still something that violates policies, just tell me. I will immediately remove it.

3. I posted a Rivaroxaban edit a while ago, but Doc James explained me that Lawsuit sites are not viable sources of information. Keep in mind that I'm European, so "lawsuits" here do not even properly exist. As soon as he explained me this one rule, I never posted anything similar again.

4. . My Ondansetron edit did not point to any website I write for. Frankly, as I wrote so much about the dangers of using Ondansetron during pregnancy I felt it was my duty as a doctor and as a scientist to inform people about that. I did sourced my info with peer-reviewed articles, I didn't pointed to any lawsuit website. That's just medical information and yet again, there's absolutely no conflict of interest going on here.

5. I never took any money from Wikipedia, no conflict of interest here either

unsigned comment added by Daimyo2 ([[User talk:Daimyo2|talk contribs) 19:45, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Daimyo2, thanks for replying. As I noted above, I cut your response from my user page, and pasted it here, so that the discussion is all in one place. I am glad you responded! That is great. And yes you need to learn how to use Talk pages, as discussion among editors is essential for Wikipedia to function. Every article, and every User page, has an associated Talk page, just like this one. You find the article's talk page by clicking the tab that says Talk in the upper left hand corner of any article or User page. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting - when you reply to someone, you put a colon ":" in front of your comment, and the Wikipedia ("WP") software converts that into an indent; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons "::" which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. When you do that, it looks like this

Yeah, I'm going to dinner now, I'll give a look to it in a half an hour! Oh and by the way, I created my profile page to give full disclosure about who am I, what I do, and what previous works I wrote to avoid any kind of potential conflict of interest. I was just adding up all the info I collected during these last few months of medical writing, and I choose some significant new discoveries on drugs and clinical trials to the Wiki. Daimyo2 (talk) 19:59, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Daimyo2[reply]

OK, so now I will respond on the substance.

• Thank you for taking the advertisement off your User page. That was perfect.
• Also, thank you for making it clear that you have never taken a freelance job to create or edit a Wikipedia article. Please know that this happens a lot and it is something we keep a lookout for.
• With regard to your edits about side effects of the drugs, and your involvement with the lawyers pursuing litigation about them. Even if you were just volunteering with those groups, In Wikipedia (and I imagine in any other context where you do medical writing, but definitely here in Wikipedia) your involvement with those groups constitutes an "external relationship" that creates a conflict of interest for any edits you would make here in Wikipedia about those drugs. I didn't this ask the following yet, but I will now -- would you please disclose if you are being paid, or expect to be paid, for your work writing on the webpages of the lawyers who are pursuing litigation? Let me pause here, and give you a chance to answer that question before we continue (and we have lots more to discuss).... Thanks again for talking! Jytdog (talk) 20:04, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I just added this info to my page: "I worked as medical writer for several websites about US lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, and by :::doing that I learned a lot about potentially unknown drugs injuries and harm. Although I am often paid by people who pursue litigations and ask for :::compensation, every information I will upload on Wiki will be properly sourced and free of any personal interest. What I do care about is the health of :::people worldwide, not just in the US, and by providing information about health and medicine to everybody I'm just trying to help people get informed enough to preserve their health."

Do you think it's enough? Also, is there any way to edit the talk page without using the "Edit source" option? It's frankly annoying to be forced to add :::those pesky ":::" to avery single line!

You are jumping ahead. Remember that above I said that there are two steps - disclosure and then using "peer review"? We are just focusing on step 1 now. Please undo what you did to your user page, because as you will soon see, it doesn't make sense with regard to the appropriate disclosures nor with the "peer review" part. So please do just revert that for now. Please take this step by step.

So resuming - you didn't actually answer my question. Are you paid, or do you expect to be paid, for your work with the groups pursuing litigation on rivaroxaban and on ondansetron? I just need a "yes" or a "no". Thanks. (and yes, the only way to "Talk" is by using this ridiculous set up. It is one of the editing community's long-standing complaints with the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the website and controls the software) Jytdog (talk) 20:26, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I removed it. And my answer is "yes" I do work for people who pursue litigation in the US (although, as I said, I'm European).Daimyo2 (talk) 20:38, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Daimyo2[reply]

OK, A last set of questions on the rivaroxaban and on ondansetron litigation work (I'll have one more set after this, and then the disclosure piece will be done) . OK so you were paid to write on those websites. The last two questions about that, are - is your arrangement regarding the litigation, limited to writing only on those websites, or is it also to "get the word out" more broadly about side effects? That is again just a simple yes or no. Depending on your answer, I will have one more question about this. (and Thanks for putting up with this - it would be much faster and more friendly if we were talking!) Jytdog (talk) 20:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

First thing first, I've condensed my previous interventions, but I did not touch yours. Feel free to edit them so we can cut the article a bit! :) Anyways the answer is NO, I'm not paid for any kind of advertisement about potential negative side effects. I'm just paid to do researches and write articles on drugs and medical devices, period. Daimyo2 (talk) 20:54, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Daimyo2[reply]

Hm. I noticed that you condensed what you had written. In general please don't edit comments that you have already written, after people have responded to them - and yes do not ever fiddle with what other people write. If you want to change something you already wrote, you have to redact it - if you want to "delete" something you actually strike it, like this and if you want to add something, you show the addition with an underline, like this (this is discussed in the talk page guidelines and yes I know the software is absurdly outdated). Thanks for the offer to talk and it would be faster and easier but I don't have a Jytdog skype account. I do have a jytdog gmail so we could go that way. it is jytdog @ gmail. we are almost done tho. and whatever we end up with there, we will want to memorialize in WP... but it would be more efficient that way for sure!

in any case, that question was just directed whether you have a plain old COI with regard to the litigation about those two drugs, or whether, within Wikipedia, we would consider you to have the "paid editor" kind of COI. We can consider you just to have a plain old COI, not the paid kind. So would you please add to your User page: "I work for attorneys who are conducting litigation on rivaroxaban and on ondansetron. That work creates a conflict of interest here in Wikipedia, and I will abide by the COI guideline if I want to work on articles about those drugs, the drug class, etc". If you are doing work for any other litigators and you want to work on - or have worked on - articles about those drugs or the drug class or the MoA from which toxicity arises etc - would you please add a similarly specific disclosure to your User page?

OK, the last question and then we are done with the disclosure bit (and then we can logically create a new subsection so less scrolling!) OK - have you taken any paid editing job, where your task is to get the word out generally (as opposed to writing some specific piece)? If the answer is "yes", then please disclose who paid you, and the relevant Wikipedia articles. If the answer is no, you can just say no. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 21:10, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I just reverted all the changes back, I only did them because I thought you asked me to condensate! My bad. The answer to this last question, again, is NO. I just added a COI Disclosure on my personal page too. I am sending you an email about the next section, so we can discuss it faster there, and then we will copy-paste it here. Daimyo2 (talk) 21:25, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Daimyo2[reply]

OK, the peer review" piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary (no publisher, no editor, no peer review). What we ask editors who have a COI to do, when they want to work on a topic where they have a COI, is a) if you create an article, submit it through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes. b) And if you want to change content in an existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. To do that, you create a new section on the article Talk page, place the {{Request edit}} template there, and then request the change you want to make. It should be really specific, and have good sourcing. People who watch the article will respond, review, and if it is good, will implement it or will give you the green light to do so. Does that make sense, and will you agree to do that, where you have a COI going forward? Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 22:08, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yay! Crystal clear! Daimyo2 (talk) 22:11, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Daimyo2[reply]